The Wednesday edition of online newsletter Crikey included a good piece by Canberra
correspondent Bernard Keane on the inconsistent standards applied by Visa and
Mastercard, whose joint financial blockade of the organisation has starved it
of about 80% of its funds.
Keane writes that in doing so these financial giants are partly
relying on the Australian government’s discredited claims about the illegality
of WikiLeaks’ publication of diplomatic cables.
The fact that no prosecution has been mounted anywhere
against WikiLeaks’ publication or sourcing the cables doesn’t bother them: Visa
Europe’s position is that the blockade will be lifted when it is “finally
determined” that WikiLeaks is not acting illegally – a stance which relies on
proving a negative.
Keane goes on:
Mastercard and Visa have also
failed to apply the test of whether an organisation has been “finally
determined” to have not acted illegally in other circumstances. Rupert
Murdoch’s News International has already admitted in court to the crimes of
phone hacking and computer hacking and its current and former staff are facing
charges of bribery, with claims that complicity in those crimes goes into
senior management levels; News Corporation itself is also under investigation
in the US for bribery of foreign officials.
By this logic, both News
International and News Corporation itself should have been blockaded by Visa
and Mastercard long ago, and remain blockaded until the resolution of all
pending investigations and court actions arising from their activities.
The Government does not come out of it well:
The government has been
repeatedly invited to withdraw its description of WikiLeaks’s activities as
illegal and has so far declined to do so.
This is consistent with its standard positions of never
admitting an error, never offending the United States, and always doing as
little as possible to assist Australians it does not happen to like, including
(especially) Julian Assange himself.
Tomorrow (Friday 20 May) in Sydney I will be chairing a session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival entitled Who’s afraid of WikLeaks.
The members of the panel will be
- Suelette Dreyfus, author (with Julian Assange) of Underground, William Heinemann, Sydney 2011 – the story of the 1980s-1990s hacker underground, an important segment of which was operating out of Melbourne.
- Andrew Fowler, author of The Most Dangerous Man in the World, Melbourne University Press, 2011
- Barbara Gunnell, author of Rebel, public nuisance and dreamer: Julian Assange standing alone, GriffithREVIEW 32, March 2011.
- Robert Manne, author of The Cypherpunk Revolutionary, The Monthly, March 2011.
- Guy Rundle, author of Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take, Overland, Issue No. 202, Autumn 2011.
The session will take place at Sydney Town Hall, 6.00-7.30 pm. The SWF webpage for the session may be accessed here.
I have signed a release for the ABC to make audio or video recordings of the session, and will post links for anything that goes to air after the Festival.
In a must-read article entitled What the Guantanamo leaks won’t reveal in Al Jazeera, 25 April 2011, Darryl Li, a graduate of Yale Law School who has worked on legal defense of Guantánamo detainees, reflects on a few things that may not be explicit in the Guantánamo files released by WikiLeaks but are crucial to understanding their significance.
In the section on “threat assessments” Li begins:
If the initial document dump is any guide, most of what Wikileaks has obtained are “detainee assessments” that reveal more about the inner fantasy world of the US intelligence apparatus than who the detainees really are. The fantasy is not some elaborate conspiracy to fabricate stories from whole cloth; rather, it is the result of an intense desire for “useful” intelligence, coupled with an astounding lack of safeguards or quality control.
Later:
Although these assessments would be considered “analytical” rather than “raw” intelligence, one can see very little analysis in them at all. They cite intelligence reports without any discernible attempt to assess their veracity. They read as if someone searched for the detainee’s name in a giant database and then simply pasted together all the passages they could find. For these reasons, one of the worst things one could do is use these files as a baseline for assessing the culpability or dangerousness of their subjects. The “detainee assessments” should not feed the stale, speculative, and fearmongering debate over Guantánamo “recidivism”; they should end it.
In subsequent sections he deals with the impact of detainee torture and abuse, the farce of the prosecutions, the other prisons and the role of the client states, especially Egypt, Jordan and Morocco. Read Li’s piece in full here.
Li’s appraisal of the threat assessments resonates with my own. Having read the Recommendation to a Retain under DoD Control (DoD) for a Guantanamo Detainee relating to Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib (see here) and that relating to David Hicks (see here) I am singularly unimpressed by either their alleged intelligence value or the case they make for retaining someone in detention.
To take just one example relating to Habib, after acknowledging that a number of statements allegedly made to Egyptian interrogators were made under extreme duress, and all subsequently withdrawn, the writer of the assessments includes one of them (“lnformation was found on his home computer regarding poisoning rivers in the U.S.”) stated as fact in the summary of reasons why he should continue to be detained, probably the only paragraph a busy senior officer would read.
David Hicks was assessed as “a highly skilled and advanced combatant, as well as a valuable asset and possible leader for extremist organizations”, in spite of his never having succeeded in getting himself into a combat zone, and in spite of the assessment report adducing no evidence of his leadership potential. There is more to advanced combat skill than attending a series of training courses, some of which Hicks did not complete, and there is no evidence he has ever led anyone.
Both these reports show evidence of being what they are: reports written within a military chain of command for a higher level officer who did not expect to receive recommendations for release. It looks to me as though the drafter of the reports started with the recommendation to retain and worked his way back to the best case he could make, which in both cases is full of holes. A prosecutor would have a torrid time trying to make any of this “evidence” stand up in a civilian court.
US blogger Greg Mitchell, who has been following the WikiLeaks story very closely (blogging developments in real time since the beginning) has recently posted on Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) a list of the major revelations that have come from the cables released so far.
It’s quite a list, and should dispose once and for all with the claim that there is “nothing new” in the WikiLeaks cables.
Among my favourites in Mitchell’s list is the fact that in 2009 the UK promised to protect US interests in the official Chilcot inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the start of the Iraq invasion – just in case you thought that this would be a no holds barred quest for the truth.
Another is the fact that Israel wanted to bring Gaza to the brink of economic collapse – just in case you thought that Israel wasn’t into collective punishment of the hapless citizens of Gaza.
A somewhat surprising revelation is the fact that Iraqi government officials see Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling state.
The fact that Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda is one “revelation” that genuinely does come under the rubric “nothing new”.
The leaking of 250,000 United States State Department cables to the WIkiLeaks organisation has generated an enormous amount of excitement about the fact of the leaks (how is this possible?), the content of the cables (did he/she/they really say that?), and the motives of people like Julian Assange, with some overheated commentary from the left (Assange is a champion of free speech) and from US conservatives (Assange is determined to destroy the United States and should be treated as an unlawful enemy combatant).
The excitement will die down over time, although with only a tiny fragment of the total amount of leaked material having seen the light of day, we can expect this to take a while.
While the content of many of the individual cables is interesting, the leadership behaviours that the release has provoked, and that are revealed in the 200 or so cables we have seen so far, are more important to any assessment of the overall impact on our society.
Three behaviour patterns are of principal concern. First, incidents such as this bring out the authoritarian instincts of our political leaders and lead them to indulge in such gross hyperbole that they misrepresent the situation to the Australian public.
The Prime Minister rushed to judgement, declaring Assange’s behaviour to be both “grossly irresponsible” and “illegal”, sentiments echoed by Attorney-General Robert McClelland. They then established a task force to identify what if any laws Assange might have broken. Embarrassingly for the Government, it took the Australian Federal Police only days to conclude that Assange had broken no Australian laws.
Attorney-General McClelland also claimed that the publication of the cables would put lives at risk, an echo of US commentary. If lives are indeed put at risk by the release, the primary responsibility would lie with the originator of the cable, because it would be an act of lunacy to name someone who was giving information at risk of life and limb in a cable that was destined to be posted on a diplomatic network to which about 3 million people have access. I have seen nothing in the cables I have read that would cause people named therein anything more than embarrassment.
More disturbingly, the cables reveal that behind closed doors our political leaders deal incautiously with representatives of the United States and Israel. They seem to forget that they are dealing with the representatives of a foreign country, in a game that is definitely reserved for grown-ups, the world of navigating our country through the shoals of major international events. They make such forthright and absolute declarations of support that they give hostages to fortune, leaving themselves little room to negotiate on issues arising in the future on the basis of a hard-nosed assessment of where Australia’s national interest lies – indeed at times they give the impression they would struggle to see the difference between Australia’s national interests and those of the United States or Israel.
Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd are at pains to impress on the US Ambassador how rock-solid on the ANZUS Alliance they are, Beazley so much so that he assures the Ambassador that Labor would support Australia’s military contributions in Afghanistan until Hell freezes over, and that in the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the U.S.
We know from the cables that in 2008 Kevin Rudd went out of his way to express his strong support for Israel and his appreciation of its security concerns. Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem told the Americans that Rudd was "deeply worried" that Iran's intransigence means that the window for a diplomatic solution is closing and that Israel may feel forced to use "non-diplomatic" means. This reads to me like a signal from Rudd that Australia would be very understanding if Israel felt “forced” to do something as undiplomatic as carry out a pre-emptive military strike against Iran. There has been a price to pay for Rudd’s pro-Israeli stance – retaliatory steps by the Iranians have made it more difficult for the Australian Embassy in Tehran to do its job effectively, which doesn’t seem to me to serve anyone’s interests.
Julia Gillard too went out of her way to establish a relationship with the Israeli Ambassador and asked him to arrange an early opportunity for her to visit. When the Israelis invaded Gaza, they were pleasantly surprised to find that Acting Prime Minister Gillard was much more supportive than they had expected, and just plain surprised to find that Foreign Minister Stephen Smith was on holiday and did not want to get involved.
The “Israel right or wrong” attitude of both Rudd and Gillard is quite over the top, at variance with our traditional stance of at least claiming even-handedness, and at variance with our national interests. I would define these to include the establishment of a lasting peace in the Middle East, which necessarily includes a decent outcome for the Palestinian people, and the establishment and maintenance of constructive relations with all countries of the region including Iran. I do not see how we can contribute to those outcomes if we are seen by all including Israel as a country Israel can afford to take for granted. Why would we want to tell any country that it can count on our support no matter how it behaves – so much so in Israel’s case that we are seen as a valuable part of its global PR battle?
The effect of these conversations behind closed doors is that the United States and Israel can go about their affairs confident that Australia will never press them on any issue, and on most occasions will even refrain from critical comment. Why would any country put itself in this situation, even with its friends?
Most serious of all, it is now clear that our national leaders use the shelter of national security classification to conceal from the public their real assessments and motives, and the advice they are receiving from their intelligence agencies. Such behaviour is unconscionable. There are many valid national security grounds for Governments withholding information from us, but they are not entitled to deceive us, not is it in their interests to do so.
Several examples have come to light. It is reassuring to know that our top level intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, which reports directly to the Prime Minister, has a sober and balanced view of the threat from Al- Qa’ida and of Iran, two subjects on which our Government has much to say. In November 2008 Director General Peter Varghese told the Americans that al-Qa’ida “ultimately has failed to achieve the strategic leadership role it sought within the Islamic world”. On Iran, he said that ONA viewed Tehran's nuclear program within the paradigm of "the laws of deterrence," and that "It's a mistake to think of Iran as a 'Rogue State'."
These sober assessments are at variance, however, with the explanations the Government gives us for our presence in Afghanistan (we have to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists) with its alarmist comments about Iran, which simply echo commentary coming out of Israel, and with Kevin Rudd’s comments to the Israeli Ambassador noted above. Governments are of course entitled to reject the advice they get from their advisers, but there is nothing sensitive about the comments by Director General ONA noted above, and on a matter of this importance it would be desirable to disclose to us what the overall assessment of our national assessments agency is and why the Government itself sees things differently.
Perhaps the most serious case of deception relates to the prospects for the war in Afghanistan. The stock line from Western Governments is that they are optimistic, things are going well, perhaps not quite as well as we would like, but we are making progress. What we find from WikiLeaks is that the real assessment – no doubt shared by all our NATO allies – is quite different. In October 2008 Kevin Rudd told visiting US Congressmen that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan, a pessimism which was evident in a December 2009 cable reporting the views of Australia’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, former Defence Secretary Ric Smith, who referred to the “train wreck” the Australian Federal Police have to deal with in working with the Afghan National Police.
This gap between the public statements and the Government’s real views is outrageous. The situation it suggests is that all Western Governments involved know the outlook in Afghanistan is very bleak, but none is prepared to confess this to their public.
Contrast this with the way Winston Churchill took the British people into his confidence during the days when his country was in dire peril. When he addressed the House of Commons upon becoming Prime Minister in May 1940, Churchill did not gild the lily – he promised the British people nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat. When Britain faced the prospect of invasion, he held out the thoroughly unattractive prospect of the British people fighting the invading Germans on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills.
In his speech at the Mansion House in November 1942, after the mighty victory over the Afrika Korps in the Second Battle of Alamein, he said that the occasion was not the end, it was not even the beginning of the end, but it was perhaps the end of the beginning.
In all these dire circumstances Churchill was straight with the British people. He rightly withheld from them a vast array of military and other secrets, but in asking them to shoulder the burden of facing Hitler all but alone, he did not leave them in any doubt about how difficult it would be or what price they would be called upon to pay.
On Afghanistan our political leaders should be dealing with the Australian people in a similarly forthright way, telling us why we are there, why it is important, and what we need to do to succeed. We are a mature and sensible people. If the Government can convince us of what the task is (something that remains a mystery) and why it is important, we will rise to what is needed to succeed, and the Government can proceed confident that it has the backing of the majority of Australians. If it cannot convince us of the importance of the task, or even define it coherently, then maybe we shouldn’t be there.
What the WikiLeaks cables are progressively revealing is patterns of behaviour on the part of our political leaders that involve very substantial breaches of trust. This is a matter of the highest importance. Democracy both depends upon trust, and thrives upon it, as many great examples of democratic societies rising to the occasion in difficult circumstances demonstrate. It is to be hoped that, whatever other consequences the leaks might have, they result in a closer alignment between what our political leaders say to other governments in private and what they say and disclose to us.
Note: This item was first published on Inside Story on 23 December 2010 – access it here.
In a very thought-provoking article in the Atlanta Post, former Capitol Hill staffer turned political blogger Yvette Carnell raises the question of why the media and the usual African-American spokespeople are missing in action when it comes to what the Wikileaks cables reveal about the corrupt and despotic regimes og Africa:
She begins:
Unless you’re plugged into the feeds of international news organizations or you get your news directly from the Wikileaks site, you wouldn’t know that many of the Wikileaks cables delve deeply into issues which impact the continent of Africa and other brown and black countries. You wouldn’t know because the brown and black mouthpieces responsible for connecting the dots have been – by in large, well…silent.
In the last few weeks, we’ve learned that the cables reveal that the Saudi government believes that Hezbollah is setting up bases in Africa and that China is operating on the continent in partnership with ‘unsavory’ regimes. No surprises here. Africa has become a veritable wasteland to an array of world leaders for whom the road to economic dominance meanders through Africa’s limitless pool of slave labor and mineral-rich resources.
It is also no surprise that, as usual, the global community doesn’t give a rat’s behind about the plight of the dark continent or its inhabitants. For the most part, establishment journalists have gone on the hunt for Wikileaks founder Assange in lockstep with the governments that he offended by leaking the official diplomatic cables. Instead of directing their critical voice at the corrupt governments who lie, steal, and break both national and international laws, pseudo-journalists have their crossairs aimed at Assange. Mixed in with the meshing of pretend journalists and administration officials, however, is the deafening silence of African American leadership (if such a thing still exists) on the Wikileaks revelations on Africa.
The following article was published in lightly edited form as an op-ed piece in the Monday 13 December edition of The Age, under the title The net will win against deception - see the published piece online here.
Begins
Nations need secrets. They are fundamental to the preservation of national security.
Democracy demands openness and governments dealing frankly and honestly with the people to whom they are accountable.
If the point of national security is to preserve our open democratic society, we must start with a presumption of openness and ask what tests a document must meet to warrant the protection of a national security classification.
Obvious subject matter includes sensitive military technologies, the design and performance characteristics of military equipment, technical means of intelligence collection, human intelligence sources, intelligence priorities, defence science programs and priorities, the readiness state of elements of the Australian Defence Force, information about military operations, operational plans and other information about actual or planned deployments. Release of any such material would enable a potential adversary to put counter-measures in place and/or improve the performance of their own forces.
Material falling into these categories would be classified TOP SECRET, SECRET, CONFIDENTIAL or RESTRICTED according to the consequences for national security if it were to be made public, ranging from “exceptionally grave” to not much.
In my younger days one of the attributes that would attract a CONFIDENTIAL classification was that the information, if known, “could cause administrative embarrassment”. In these days of Freedom of Information legislation, release of a document could not as a matter of law be withheld on the grounds that the information would cause administrative embarrassment – a point to be borne in mind in considering many of the WikiLeaks revelations.
Within this framework a security classification would apply to many diplomatic communications, but they cannot be justified by a desire to protect the exchange of scuttlebutt, or self-aggrandisement like Mr Rudd big-noting himself by referring to the French and German efforts in Afghanistan as “organising folk-dancing festivals”.
Nor should national security classifications be used to conceal from the public the real assessments and motives of the governments we elect.
Some striking examples of this have come to light in the last couple of days. One relates to the Chinese response to provocative and unnecessary commentary about China in the 2009 Defence White Paper, which I understand was inserted at the behest of then Prime Minister Rudd. The Australian public was told from the Defence Minister down that China had no particular problems with this content. Now the WikiLeaks reveal that in fact the paper’s principal author was “dressed down” by the deputy director of foreign affairs in the Chinese defence ministry. No national security purpose was served by misleading the Australian public in this way.
Other leaks show that Mr Rudd as Prime Minister was less than frank about his attitude to US deployment of ballistic missile defences, publicly opposed but privately telling the US he was on board.
Perhaps the most serious case relates to the prospects for the war in Afghanistan. The stock line from Western Governments is that they are optimistic, things are going well, perhaps not quite as well as we would like, but we are making progress. What we find from WikiLeaks is that the real assessment – no doubt shared by all our NATO allies – is quite different. In October 2008 Mr Rudd told visiting US Congressmen that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan, a pessimism which was evident in a December 2009 cable reporting the views of Australia’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, former Defence Secretary Ric Smith, who referred to the “train wreck” the Australian Federal Police have to deal with in working with the Afghan National Police.
This deceptiveness is quite unconscionable. The situation it suggests is that all Western Governments involved know the outlook in Afghanistan is very bleak, but none is prepared to confess this to their public. They all cling on, feeding us their bromides, hoping that when the war is lost it will be on someone else’s watch. Meanwhile they attend the funerals, praise the fallen and comfort the families.
Such deceptiveness is not confined to the Rudd and Gillard Governments. The Howard Government was committed to the US invasion of Iraq by July 2002; we would not have had Australians embedded in the US planning process if it were otherwise. Yet John Howard insisted right up to the eve of the March 2003 invasion that no decision had been taken on our participation.
This particular game is up – Governments will sooner or later be outed when they say one thing to foreign governments and another to their public. The world is witnessing something like a collision between two galaxies; the hot swirling mass of secret diplomatic correspondence has come into collision with the fast moving, rapidly changing and supremely adaptable mass of the internet. The latter will devour the former, and Governments had just better get used to the idea. The leaks are technology-driven – they occur because they can.
The consequences of this will not be confined to the foreign policy arena. In the hubris of power and their desire to stay in office solely for the purpose of being in office, modern governments routinely mislead us in two ways. They feed us an endless stream of misleading drivel manufactured by their spin doctors, and they withhold from us information about their real agenda and other inconvenient truths that the public has a right to know. This is now much more difficult to sustain.
Julian Assange will no doubt pay a heavy price for his role in this inevitable development, but in the long sweep of history he will be seen more as hero than as villain.
Paul Barratt AO is a former intelligence analyst and a former Secretary to the Department of Defence.
A short while ago Canberra political journalist Latika Bourke posted two tweets on comments made by the Prime Minister in relation to the WIkiLeaks issue, the first in response to a question from her:
Then JG said 'People would be aware that there’s also the issue of a warrant relating to an alleged sexual assault in Sweden.' #cablegate
The first comment is a bit of cunning wording because the illegal act to which she makes reference is not, of course, an act by Julian Assange, it is the act of a security cleared United States citizen on the US Government payroll. So as a response to Bourke’s question, “What Australian laws has Assange broken”, I will take that as a “None”, confirmed by the fact that the Government has had a task force of military personnel, intelligence officers and officials attempting to ascertain whether Assange has broken any Australian laws and if he had I am sure we would have heard about it by now.
The Prime Minister’s second comment is fascinating. Ostensibly there is no connection between the allegations of sexual assault (actually a complaint in relation to consensual sex) in Sweden and the publication of leaked US diplomatic cable traffic. The fact that the two issues are juxtaposed in the Prime Minister’s mind must make one wonder, however.
If you read Guy Rundle’s account here of the legal steps in relation to the alleged sexual assault, published in The Age, Sunday 5 December, they are so bizarre one is forced to wonder whether or not this matter is connected to WikiLeaks’ earlier file dump on Iraq and Afghanistan.
The feeling of unease is reinforced by the article When it comes to the Assange rape case, the Swedes are making it up as they go along, by Melbourne barrister James D. Catlin, who acted for Julian Assange in London in October. The article appeared in Crikey on Thursday 2 December (access it here).
Under this heading Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York, provides a summary of the various punishments meted out to Julian Assange and his organisation since the last batch of WikiLeaks began to be published.
He begins:
WikiLeaks has never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted for one or convicted of one. A consensus of legal experts (see here) is that prosecuting the organisation or Julian Assange for any of its leaks would be difficult in the extreme. Despite those facts, look at just some of the punishment that has been doled out to them and what has been threatened:
He goes on to present case after case: withdrawal of domain name, freezing of PayPal account, consideration by Australia of the withdrawal of Assange’s passport, freezing by a Swiss bank of Assange’s legal defence fund, Amazon shutting off access to its site, and so the list goes on.
Greenwald concludes:
People often have a hard time believing that the terms "authoritarian" and "tyranny" apply to their own government, but that's because those who meekly stay in line and remain unthreatening are never targeted by such forces. The face of authoritarianism and tyranny reveals itself with how it responds to those who meaningfully dissent from and effectively challenge its authority: do they act within the law or solely through the use of unconstrained force?
This is a first class piece, required reading for anyone interested in the WikiLeaks issue. Read it in full here.
In an opinion piece in The Guardian published on Monday 6 December under the headline Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice, columnist John Naughton writes that Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster, and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger:
The intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.
This is an excellent piece which highlights the hypocrisy of governments that extol the virtues of openness, and the timidity of the internet service providers who have so easily fallen into line with the US Government and suddenly discovered that WikiLeaks and/or Julian Assange are in violation of the terms of their agreement. These admirable companies seem to have made no such discovery so far in relation to the major newspapers that have published the material to a far larger audience than would ever access the WikiLeaks website, and in a far more accessible form.
